Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Geographic Information System (GIS) are two technologies/systems that are used in tandem in different phases of a civil infrastructure project. CAD systems provide tools to design and manage the interior space of buildings, while GIS is used to provide information about the geo-context. These two technologies encroach upon each other's territory. In fact, the business processes related to them do not even have these boundaries. Utilities infrastructure is an area wherein integrated information management, facilitated by input from both systems, is crucial. This research provides a framework and a data model, "Network for Interior Building Utilities" (NIBU), for integrated analysis and management of interior building utilities in a micro-scale environment. The framework considers managing individual network systems by providing semantic categorization of utilities, as well as a graph structure based on a "Modern" adjacency list data structure. The framework also considers managing the interdependencies between different network systems and the building structure. NIBU is a graph-based spatial data model can be used, in providing the location and specifications of interior utilities to a technician, to perform a maintenance operation, or to estimate the effect of different maintenance operations in different locations along utility service systems. The model focuses on two important aspects: 1) the relationship between interior utilities and building elements (or spaces) and 2) the building hierarchy structure to which the utilities network is related. A proper hierarchy of the building that supports the generation of human-oriented descriptions of interior utilities is also developed during the research. In addition, a method for partitioning of large building elements (and spaces) was utilized. The connection of the different utilities network systems and buildings were established using joints, based on a containment relationship. A user requirement study consisting of three use case scenarios ("maintenance operation", "emergency response" and "inspection operation") was conducted during the research, and these use cases were used to develop the required functionalities and to test the proposed framework. The framework relies on standards data models related to Building Information Model BIM/CAD and GIS, and these standard models were used as data sources for obtaining information about the utilities. BIMs support the semantic and geometric representation of interior building utilities, and, more recently, City Geographic Markup Language (CityGML) has been extended to model utilities infrastructure. Semantic harmonization was employed to achieve the integration and provide a formal mapping between the BIM i.e. Industry Foundation Class (IFC), CityGML and NIBU. The semantic and connectivity information from these (BIM/ GIS) standards were mapped onto NIBU. Furthermore, the building structure and the required hierarchy were obtained from these models. The research proves that BIMs provide the required amount of information that is needed for the framework and model (i.e. NIBU). By contrast, CityGML does not provide the amount of detail required by NIBU. The research also provides an information system that facilitates the use of BIM for geo-analysis purposes, by populating/implementing the NIBU and its functions. BIM4GeoA is a concept for combining existing Open Source Software (OSS) and Open Specification (OS) for efficient data management and analysis of building information within its broader context. The core components of the system are the Spatial Database (i.e. PostgreSQL/PostGIS), the Building Information Model Server, a Virtual Globe application (i.e. Google Earth 3D viewer), and the models of existing BIM/3D Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards (IFC, Keyhole Markup Language (KML), CityGML). Following the system development, a thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these different components were completed to reinforce their strengths and eliminate their weaknesses. The system is used in implementing the NIBU model and its functions; i.e. NIBU is mapped to PostgreSQL/PostGIS spatial Data Base Management System (DBMS). The model is populated directly from a BIM Server with the help of an IFC parser developed during the research. Five analysis functions are implemented in the system to support spatial operations. These were: trace upstream, trace downstream, find ancestors, find source, and find disconnected. The investigation proves that NIBU provides the semantics and attributes, the connectivity information and the required relationship necessary to facilitating analysis of interior utility networks and manage its relations with building structures.

There are today many available datasets and methods that can be used to create 3D city models, which in turn can be used for numerous applications within the fields of visualization, communication and analysis. The purpose of this thesis is to perform a practical comparison between three methods for 3D city modeling using different combinations of datasets; one using LiDAR data combined with oriented aerial images, one using only oriented aerial images and one using non-oriented aerial images. In all three cases, geometry and textures are derived from the data and the models are imported into the game engine Unity. The three methods are evaluated in terms of the resulting model, the amount of manual work required and the time consumed as well as the cost of data and software licenses. An application example visualizing flooding scenarios in central Stockholm is featured in the thesis to give a simple demonstration of what can be done with 3D city models in a game engine environment. The result of the study shows that combining LiDAR data with oriented images and using a more manual process to create the model gives a higher potential for the result, both in terms of visual appearance and semantic depth. Using only oriented images and commercial software is the easiest and most reliable way to create a usable 3D city model. Non-oriented images and open-source software can be used for 3D reconstruction but is not suited for larger areas or geographic applications. Finding reliable automatic or semi-automatic methods to create semantically rich 3D city models from remote sensed data would be hugely beneficial, as more sophisticated applications could be programmed with the 3D city model as a base.

<p>3D city models have been widely used in different applications such as urban planning, traffic control, disaster management etc. Effective visualisation of 3D city models in various scales is one of the pivotal techniques to implement these applications. In this thesis, a framework is proposed to visualise the 3D city models both online and offline using City Geography Makeup Language (CityGML) and Extensible 3D (X3D) to represent and present the models. Then, generalisation methods are studied and tailored to create 3D city scenes in multi-scale dynamically. Finally, the quality of generalised 3D city models is evaluated by measuring the visual similarity from the original models.</p><p> </p><p>In the proposed visualisation framework, 3D city models are stored in CityGML format which supports both geometric and semantic information. These CityGML files are parsed to create 3D scenes and be visualised with existing 3D standard. Because the input and output in the framework are all standardised, it is possible to integrate city models from different sources and visualise them through the different viewers.</p><p> </p><p>Considering the complexity of the city objects, generalisation methods are studied to simplify the city models and increase the visualisation efficiency. In this thesis, the aggregation and typification methods are improved to simplify the 3D city models.</p><p> </p><p>Multiple representation data structures are required to store the generalisation information for dynamic visualisation. One of these is the CityTree, a novel structure to represent building group, which is tested for building aggregation. Meanwhile, Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) is employed to detect the linear building group structures in the city models and they are typified with different strategies. According to the experiments results, by using the CityTree, the generalised 3D city model creation time is reduced by more than 50%.</p><p> </p><p>Different generalisation strategies lead to different outcomes. It is important to evaluate the quality of the generalised models. In this thesis a new evaluation method is proposed: visual features of the 3D city models are represented by Attributed Relation Graph (ARG) and their similarity distances are calculated with Nested Earth Mover’s Distance (NEMD) algorithm. The calculation results and user survey show that the ARG and NEMD methods can reflect the visual similarity between generalised city models and the original ones.</p> / QC 20100923 / ViSuCity Project

A great interest in 3-D modeling in Geographic Information Technologies (GIS) has emerged in recent years, because many GIS related implementations, ranging from urban area design to environmental analysis require 3-D models. Especially the need for 3-D models is quite urgent in urban areas. However, numerous applications in GIS only represent two-dimensional information. The GIS community has been struggling with solving complex problems dealing with 3-D objects using a 2-D approach. This research focused on finding most accurate method which is used for getting height information that is used in 3D modeling of man made structures in urban areas. The first method is estimating height information from floor numbers of the buildings data from municipal database systems. The second method is deriving heights of buildings from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) that is generated from stereo satellite images. The third method is measuring height values of the buildings from 3D view of stereo IKONOS satellite images by operators. The comparisons between these three methods are done with respect to height data collected from field study, and according to these comparisons, the amount of the error is determined. The error is classified according to floor numbers of buildings, so that, the quantified errors can be applied for similar works in future. Lastly, the third method is utilized by the assistance of 10 people who have different experience level about 3D viewing, in order to see the error amount changes according to different operators. Several results are presented with a discussion of evaluation of the methods applied. It is found that, if there is an updated floor number database, obtaining building height is the most accurate way from this database. The second most accurate method is found to be getting height information by using 3D view of stereo IKONOS images through experienced users.

An increasing number of applications requires user interfaces that facilitate the handling of large geodata sets. Using virtual 3D city models, complex geospatial information can be communicated visually in an intuitive way. Therefore, real-time visualization of virtual 3D city models represents a key functionality for interactive exploration, presentation, analysis, and manipulation of geospatial data. This thesis concentrates on the development and implementation of concepts and techniques for real-time city model visualization. It discusses rendering algorithms as well as complementary modeling concepts and interaction techniques. Particularly, the work introduces a new real-time rendering technique to handle city models of high complexity concerning texture size and number of textures. Such models are difficult to handle by current technology, primarily due to two problems: - Limited texture memory: The amount of simultaneously usable texture data is limited by the memory of the graphics hardware. - Limited number of textures: Using several thousand different textures simultaneously causes significant performance problems due to texture switch operations during rendering. The multiresolution texture atlases approach, introduced in this thesis, overcomes both problems. During rendering, it permanently maintains a small set of textures that are sufficient for the current view and the screen resolution available. The efficiency of multiresolution texture atlases is evaluated in performance tests. To summarize, the results demonstrate that the following goals have been achieved: - Real-time rendering becomes possible for 3D scenes whose amount of texture data exceeds the main memory capacity. - Overhead due to texture switches is kept permanently low, so that the number of different textures has no significant effect on the rendering frame rate. Furthermore, this thesis introduces two new approaches for real-time city model visualization that use textures as core visualization elements: - An approach for visualization of thematic information. - An approach for illustrative visualization of 3D city models. Both techniques demonstrate that multiresolution texture atlases provide a basic functionality for the development of new applications and systems in the domain of city model visualization. / Eine zunehmende Anzahl von Anwendungen benötigt Benutzungsschnittstellen, um den Umgang mit großen Geodatenmengen zu ermöglichen. Virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodelle bieten eine Möglichkeit, komplexe raumbezogene Informationen auf intuitive Art und Weise visuell erfassbar zu machen. Echtzeit-Visualisierung virtueller Stadtmodelle bildet daher eine Grundlage für die interaktive Exploration, Präsentation, Analyse und Bearbeitung raumbezogener Daten. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Entwicklung und Implementierung von Konzepten und Techniken für die Echtzeit-Visualisierung virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle. Diese umfassen sowohl Rendering-Algorithmen als auch dazu komplementäre Modellierungskonzepte und Interaktionstechniken. Insbesondere wird in dieser Arbeit eine neue Echtzeit-Rendering-Technik für Stadtmodelle hoher Komplexität hinsichtlich Texturgröße und Texturanzahl vorgestellt. Solche Modelle sind durch die derzeit zur Verfügung stehende Technologie schwierig zu bewältigen, vor allem aus zwei Gründen: - Begrenzter Textur-Speicher: Die Menge an gleichzeitig nutzbaren Texturdaten ist beschränkt durch den Speicher der Grafik-Hardware. - Begrenzte Textur-Anzahl: Die gleichzeitige Verwendung mehrerer tausend Texturen verursacht erhebliche Performance-Probleme aufgrund von Textur-Umschaltungs-Operationen während des Renderings. Das in dieser Arbeit vorgestellte Verfahren, das Rendering mit Multiresolutions-Texturatlanten löst beide Probleme. Während der Darstellung wird dazu permanent eine kleine Textur-Menge verwaltet, die für die aktuelle Sichtperspektive und die zur Verfügung stehende Bildschirmauflösung hinreichend ist. Die Effizienz des Verfahrens wird in Performance-Tests untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die folgenden Ziele erreicht werden: - Echtzeit-Darstellung wird für Modelle möglich, deren Texturdaten-Menge die Kapazität des Hauptspeichers übersteigt. - Der Overhead durch Textur-Umschaltungs-Operationen wird permanent niedrig gehalten, so dass die Anzahl der unterschiedlichen Texturen keinen wesentlichen Einfluss auf die Bildrate der Darstellung hat. Die Arbeit stellt außerdem zwei neue Ansätze zur 3D-Stadtmodell-Visualisierung vor, in denen Texturen als zentrale Visualisierungselemente eingesetzt werden: - Ein Verfahren zur Visualisierung thematischer Informationen. - Ein Verfahren zur illustrativen Visualisierung von 3D-Stadtmodellen. Beide Ansätze zeigen, dass Rendering mit Multiresolutions-Texturatlanten eine Grundlage für die Entwicklung neuer Anwendungen und Systeme im Bereich der 3D-Stadtmodell-Visualisierung bietet.

Objective of the research. The improvement of a methodology of a city’s 3-dimensional geoinformation system development, updating and registration of changes by applying geodetic and photogrammetric measurements.

Les modélisations 3D de ville se multiplient à travers le monde et deviennent aujourd’hui accessibles grâce à la volonté des communes de les proposer librement. Il est ainsi aujourd’hui possible d’accéder à plusieurs milliers de kilomètres carrés de territoires urbains modélisés en 3D. Nous présentons dans cette thèse un ensemble de méthodes permettant d’enrichir un modèle virtuel 3D de ville, de l’organiser afin de faciliter son utilisation, puis de l’analyser en détectant les changements entre deux millésimes ou en mesurant son ambiance visuelle selon les besoins de l’utilisateur. Nous proposons dans un premier temps un algorithme permettant de compléter un modèle 3D en y adjoignant une définition sémantique grâce au cadastre, ainsi qu’une méthode de calcul de la canopée végétale 3D par croisement de données. Puis nous proposons des stratégies d’organisation du modèle 3D de la ville selon des critères géométriques et sémantiques afin de faciliter son parcours. Nous présentons ensuite des méthodes comparant deux millésimes de données représentant un même territoire dans le but de produire un unique modèle temporel contenant un ensemble de versions. Enfin, nous cherchons à mesurer l’ambiance visuelle de la ville via l’analyse de la composition d’un champ de vision ainsi que de l’ensoleillement et des ombres portées présentes sur un territoire. Ces mesures peuvent être liées à des données externes afin de proposer de multiples interprétations en fonction des besoins de l’utilisateur.Tous ces travaux se font dans un contexte d’interopérabilité et de généricité puisqu’ils ont pour objectif de pouvoir être utilisés avec des jeux de données provenant du monde entier. Nous basons donc nos méthodes sur l’utilisation de standards internationaux aussi bien pour les données en entrée que pour les résultats en sortie. Il est ainsi possible, dans le cadre d’une approche voulue dans un contexte de pluralité scientifique au sein du LabEx IMU, de mettre à disposition de la communauté les résultats mais aussi nos algorithmes proposés au sein d’un logiciel développé en open source. / 3D virtual models of cities are multiplying throughout the world and now become accessible thanks to the will of the communes to propose them freely. Today, it is possible to access several thousand square kilometres of urban territories modelled in 3D.We present in this thesis a set of methods to enrich a 3D virtual city model, organize it to facilitate its use and then analyse it by detecting changes between two vintages or by measuring its visual atmosphere according to the user’s needs. We first propose an algorithm to complete a 3D model by adding a semantic definition thanks to the cadastre, and a method to compute the 3D plant canopy by crossing data. Then we propose strategies to organize the 3D model of the city according to geometric and semantic criteria in order to facilitate its browsing. We then present methods comparing two vintages of data representing the same territory in order to produce a single temporal model containing a set of versions. Finally, we try to measure the visual atmosphere of the city by analysing the composition of a field of vision as well as the amount of sunshine and the shadows on a territory. These measurements can be linked to external data in order to propose multiple interpretations according to the user’s needs.All this work is done in a context of interoperability and genericity since it aims to be used with datasets from all over the world. We therefore base our methods on the use of international standards for both input and output data. It is thus possible, in a context of scientific plurality within the LabEx IMU, to make available to the community the results but also our algorithms proposed within an open source developed software.

3D city models have been widely used in different applications such as urban planning, traffic control, disaster management etc. Effective visualisation of 3D city models in various scales is one of the pivotal techniques to implement these applications. In this thesis, a framework is proposed to visualise the 3D city models both online and offline using City Geography Makeup Language (CityGML) and Extensible 3D (X3D) to represent and present the models. Then, generalisation methods are studied and tailored to create 3D city scenes in multi-scale dynamically. Finally, the quality of generalised 3D city models is evaluated by measuring the visual similarity from the original models.   In the proposed visualisation framework, 3D city models are stored in CityGML format which supports both geometric and semantic information. These CityGML files are parsed to create 3D scenes and be visualised with existing 3D standard. Because the input and output in the framework are all standardised, it is possible to integrate city models from different sources and visualise them through the different viewers.   Considering the complexity of the city objects, generalisation methods are studied to simplify the city models and increase the visualisation efficiency. In this thesis, the aggregation and typification methods are improved to simplify the 3D city models.   Multiple representation data structures are required to store the generalisation information for dynamic visualisation. One of these is the CityTree, a novel structure to represent building group, which is tested for building aggregation. Meanwhile, Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) is employed to detect the linear building group structures in the city models and they are typified with different strategies. According to the experiments results, by using the CityTree, the generalised 3D city model creation time is reduced by more than 50%.   Different generalisation strategies lead to different outcomes. It is important to evaluate the quality of the generalised models. In this thesis a new evaluation method is proposed: visual features of the 3D city models are represented by Attributed Relation Graph (ARG) and their similarity distances are calculated with Nested Earth Mover’s Distance (NEMD) algorithm. The calculation results and user survey show that the ARG and NEMD methods can reflect the visual similarity between generalised city models and the original ones. / QC 20100923 / ViSuCity Project

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3D city models have been widely used in various applications such as urban planning, traffic control, disaster management etc. Efficient visualisation of 3D city models in different levels of detail (LODs) is one of the pivotal technologies to support these applications. In this thesis, a framework is proposed to visualise the 3D city models online. Then, generalisation methods are studied and tailored to create 3D city scenes in different scales dynamically. Multiple representation structures are designed to preserve the generalisation results on different level. Finally, the quality of the generalised 3D city models is evaluated by measuring the visual similarity with the original models.   In the proposed online visualisation framework, City Geography Makeup Language (CityGML) is used to represent city models, then 3D scenes in Extensible 3D (X3D) are generated from the CityGML data and dynamically updated to the user side for visualisation in the Web-based Graphics Library (WebGL) supported browsers with X3D Document Object Model (X3DOM) technique. The proposed framework can be implemented at the mainstream browsers without specific plugins, but it can only support online 3D city model visualisation in small area. For visualisation of large data volumes, generalisation methods and multiple representation structures are required.   To reduce the 3D data volume, various generalisation methods are investigated to increase the visualisation efficiency. On the city block level, the aggregation and typification methods are improved to simplify the 3D city models. On the street level, buildings are selected according to their visual importance and the results are stored in the indexes for dynamic visualisation. On the building level, a new LOD, shell model, is introduced. It is the exterior shell of LOD3 model, in which the objects such as windows, doors and smaller facilities are projected onto walls.  On the facade level, especially for textured 3D buildings, image processing and analysis methods are employed to compress the texture.   After the generalisation processes on different levels, multiple representation data structures are required to store the generalised models for dynamic visualisation. On the city block level the CityTree, a novel structure to represent group of buildings, is tested for building aggregation. According to the results, the generalised 3D city model creation time is reduced by more than 50% by using the CityTree. Meanwhile, a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) is employed to detect the linear building group structures in the city models and they are typified with different strategies. On the building level and the street level, the visible building index is created along the road to support building selection. On facade level the TextureTree, a structure to represent building facade texture, is created based on the texture segmentation.   Different generalisation strategies lead to different outcomes. It is critical to evaluate the quality of the generalised models. Visually salient features of the textured building models such as size, colour, height, etc. are employed to calculate the visual difference between the original and the generalised models. Visual similarity is the criterion in the street view level building selection. In this thesis, the visual similarity is evaluated locally and globally. On the local level, the projection area and the colour difference between the original and the generalised models are considered. On the global level, the visual features of the 3D city models are represented by Attributed Relation Graphs (ARG) and their similarity distances are calculated with the Nested Earth Mover’s Distance (NEMD) algorithm.   The overall contribution of this thesis is that 3D city models are generalised in different scales (block, street, building and facade) and the results are stored in multiple representation structures for efficient dynamic visualisation, especially for online visualisation. / QC 20111116 / ViSuCity